Monday 12 January 2015

The Fundamental Interconnectedness of Everything

Back in the early days of my involvement with the internet, I found a site called "Dirk - The fundamental interconnectedness of everything" which had as it's inspiration, a Douglas Adams novel.

The site featured connections created by visitors to it. For example, if you clicked on "cheese" you could create a connection to "cheshire", because "There is a type of cheese called cheshire cheese". Clicking on "Cheese" would then return connections to perhaps "Swizerland", "Milk", "Mouse", and now, thanks to the connection you made, "Cheshire", while a list of connections to "Cheshire" would now be something like "Chester", "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen", and now "Cheese".

In addition, it could calculate paths to different things in the database, so for example, searching for a connection between "Elvis Presley" and "Squid" might provide a six degrees of seperation list of "Elvis Presley" > "Memphis" > "Egypt" > "Mediterranean" > "Sea" > "Squid"

A pointless, fascinatng diversion, I spent many happy hours exploring its byways and adding to it's complexity. But as time went by, it became more and more unwieldy, and contained more and more irrelevent stuff, and took longer and longer to work, in those dial up days, and eventually, it's maker took it down.

But now, it's back, and you can check it out here: http://dirk.appspot.com/

Go on! Try it! It's fun! Read the guy's blog too, while you're at it.

Right now, it's lean and mean, with just a couple of thousand things and connections. I suppose since the experiment is being repeated, the same result will occur eventually, but for now, I'm having some small fun making connections.

driving lessons in North Wirral? learn to drive in Hoylake? driving instructor in Birkenhead?

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